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On the eve of our V1.1 release of DeepEarth I thought it would be interesting to show off some stats. First up the main page at codeplex is where we direct everyone to come and check it out, download the control and leave ideas and feedback.





What a difference releasing V1.0 made just before Christmas!

Next up is the Demo site we host for the project here in Australia.



We only started collecting stats when we implemented the Virtual Earth client token for the staging service of the VE Web Service in December.

So, what impact does 14,000+ pageviews have on your transaction count? Well I have that too:



Not as shocking as some people predicted, only 60 transactions per person. A transaction is 8 tiles or a geocode request. One issue we have made clear to the Virtual Earth team is that the unique token we append to the Tile requests means that...

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A new website http://geowebguru.com has launched from fellow MVP Richard Marsden. To celebrate I’ve created this article on 20 ways to use the Virtual Earth Platform as a developer. I cover Silverlight, Surface, 3D, Mobiles, SharePoint and lots more. I hope you find it really useful, its got a bunch of really cool links I’ve been collecting over the last few months.

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In the comments of the article feel free to add more links or even more uses.

http://www.geowebguru.com/articles/86-twenty-ways-to-use-the-virtual-earth-platform-as-a-developer-

I came across this awesome online tool from ito! that lets you visualise the changes made to OpenStreetMap for a specific area. You do need to register and then you can select your area of interest and see the changes made over the last configurable period. For example the additions made to Brisbane over the last 12 months:

Click for full resolution.

If your interested in developing with the next generation visualisations of Silverlight on top of the Virtual Earth Web Service (VEWS) you can now download the Version 1 release of DeepEarth.

http://www.codeplex.com/deepearth/

Visit our online sample site or watch the video:

3 months ago I kicked off a little experiment on twitter, http://twitter.com/virtualearth. As a Windows Live MVP I decided to tweet everything interesting I come across with Virtual Earth and also actively engage others tweeting about Virtual Earth.

This weekend I hit 100+ followers and feel I’m really starting to connect with others around the world interested in this technology. I tweet interesting Articles, blogs post and links specifically on Virtual Earth, nothing else.

Welcome to the first part in series that takes you through the core functionality of the Microsoft’s Virtual Earth JavaScript control. Through example code I hope to either introduce you to the Virtual Earth control or show you how to do things better and highlight some things you may not have known. I will be making use of the jQuery JavaScript library to provide valuable helper functions and simplify our code. If you feel there is something that could done better please share your ideas in the comments below.

Lets start by loading the Virtual Earth map on a page. Sounds trivial? Well it is, but lets do it as if you were building a real world application and include:

• Browser detection to only load the map for supported browsers
• Binding to the body onload method programmatically as you may not have access to the actual HTML tag

Wow! I can’t believe I haven’t done one of these since the end of July! Looks like I have a few months to catch up on.

• John presented at Virtual Earth Day in Brisbane on the 1st August
• We shared the Virtual Earth love with 100’s of school girls at the Technology Takes You Anywhere Event in Brisbane 22nd August
• We had our 1st Girl Geek Dinner in Brisbane
• We attended Code Camp New Zealand
• I presented at the

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The HDView team released a gem of a sample app this week from ICE that amongst other things provide a solution for showing 360 degree panoramas. The solution uses three MSI controls to provide a seamless panning experience.

Now what could be a bigger 360 panorama then the Earth itself?

So you’re interested in Silverlight and Virtual Earth, you’ve downloaded the DeepEarth code but are now completely lost? Well check out two 20min videos to walk you through the code and get you started. Part1 and Part2.

The videos essentially walk you through the solutions, pointing out what each of the projects does, the structure and how to get the right project running.

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control is not small weighing in at 217KB when compressed in Version 6.2. When you require the rich experience of Virtual Earth this size is not an issue, the control is aimed at broadband users and within a few moments of interacting with the map you can easy exceed this with the rich imagery being loaded on demand. But what if your web page only needs to show the Virtual Earth map when a user asks for it or you just want your page to load super fast? You need to load Virtual Earth on demand.

See an example here: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/examples/VE62/loadondemand.htm (view source for full code)